Reel Justice Redux
Episode Stats
Words per minute
187.95914
Harmful content
Misogyny
15
sentences flagged
Toxicity
24
sentences flagged
Hate speech
5
sentences flagged
Summary
Ted Cruz is sick and Ben is in bed with the flu, so we re rebroadcasting our Christmas Day podcast. This week, we re-examined some of Ted s favorite movies and TV shows, and we get to know him behind the scenes.
Transcript
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I hope you're having a wonderful Valentine's Day.
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I hope you find the love of your life and give them a hug,
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give them a kiss, and let them know they mean the world to you.
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Unfortunately today, Ben is sick in bed with a nasty flu.
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what we're going to do is we're going to rebroadcast our Christmas Day pod.
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And the Christmas Day pod was one, it's one of my favorites.
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And so I hope today on Valentine's Day, you listen to the pod, you enjoy it,
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maybe go out and watch a movie and take your wife or husband or boyfriend or girlfriend
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and have a great time at the movies, and we will see you.
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We'll do our regular Week in Review tomorrow on Saturday,
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God willing, the creek don't rise on Monday morning.
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By the way, you're a movie theater guy, just so people know this.
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I like popcorn and gummy bears and, you know, the experience of being there.
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And by the way, I'm also rabid about staying until the very end,
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There's a sense of completeness of appreciating the entirety of the movie.
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And so what we decided we'd do today is put together just a compilation of movies
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And hopefully as you're taking some time with your family,
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maybe you'll go watch one of them and laugh or cry,
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And I think art and storytelling are beautiful, beautiful things.
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So with that being said, here are the big shows and the big movies
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I get asked all the time from many of you guys that are watching or listening right now,
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And you're even going to find out what his favorite movies are.
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I get asked all the time when I'm all over the country.
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So what is Ted Cruz really like behind the scenes?
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And I say, I actually, if people got to see the side of you that I know,
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And so I'm going to ask some fun questions just to kind of let people know
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What is the last thing I watched on a plane was Outer Banks, which is a series.
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And there's a reason I'm watching a teeny bopper series,
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which is my youngest daughter, Catherine, loves Outer Banks.
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And when I dropped her off at camp, she said, Dad, I want you to watch Outer Banks
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and I want you to write to me in letters and tell me what you think as the season's progressing.
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And so I've been regularly, I write to her about every couple of days and I tell her,
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Her favorite character is JJ, who is kind of a, look, I guess if you're a 13-year-old
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girl, he's, you know, he's always doing the dumbest thing imaginable, but he's kind of
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So when you were growing up, what was it that you were watching?
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So just fast forward through this if you don't want a spoiler alert.
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But in season two, when Ward is blown up, I knew Ward was not blown up.
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And I remembered they keep scuba gear in the boat.
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And you're like, they got to keep the series going.
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So I felt pretty good that I was at least a step ahead of the Teenie Bopper series.
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So every holiday, every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, my family would go out and watch movies.
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But we would go out and do movies when I was a kid.
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When I was like eight, nine years old, my dad would drop me off at the theater all Saturday.
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I'd go from one theater to the next to the next and just watch everything there.
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So what I've done today for this show is I put together a list of 25 movies.
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And I don't even know that it's my 25 favorite, but it's 25 awesome movies, which if you haven't watched, I recommend you watch.
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You will enjoy them, you will laugh, you will be moved, you will get good things from them.
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I've got to ask one more question before you're 25.
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What movie have you watched the most in your life over and over again?
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Well, that actually happens to be number one on the list.
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So my favorite movie of all time is The Princess Bride.
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I'll tell you, in college, we used to play a game called Drinking Princess Bride.
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And so the way you play Drinking Princess Bride is you sit down with a bunch of college kids, you put the movie on,
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and you try to say each line immediately before it's said.
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If you get it right, you point at somebody they have to drink.
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And if two or more people say the same line at the same time, everybody drinks.
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Look, when you get to the As You Wishes, everyone can get them so they're all socials.
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My problem is I know just about every line from the movie, but I'll screw them up slightly.
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So I end up kind of getting myself because I try an awful lot of them.
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I probably watched The Princess Bride, I don't know, a couple hundred times.
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And I'm not going to break it down between one, two, and three.
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I even like three, which is a bit of a heretical idea.
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I think three stands on its own as its own movie the least.
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That three only makes sense in conjunction with one and two.
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Like you can't fake it and go see number three and think, oh, that was incredible.
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And look, I quote all of them all the time, you know, from three.
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Every time I get out, they keep pulling me back in.
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I will say it was a little depressing with my team where I turned, you know, Senate staffers are all children.
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Your average Senate staffer is like 23, 24, 25.
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So things like Godfather quotes, they just don't get.
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I said, you know, this is the business we have chosen.
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And I said, okay, I have like six staffers there.
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I said, all right, do any of you have any idea what I'm saying?
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And this is a conversation between Hyman Roth, who is clearly modeled after Meyer Lansky.
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Hyman Roth and Michael Corleone, and they're down in Miami.
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None of them had any idea what I was talking about.
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You should totally bring them in one, two, and three.
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To be honest, I'm not going to because they're pretty off color and I'm going to avoid putting
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out on the podcast some of the language from it.
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I'm actually shocked by that one because if there was only one box that I could take
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with me my whole life, like if I was stuck on a desert island, it'd be West Wing.
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But Criminal Minds is, I just find it fascinating.
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When Criminal Minds is on, she's like, turn that garbage off because, you know, you've got
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I'm like, no, no, they're the bad guys, though.
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But she just doesn't like that in the house.
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Chevy Chase plays Erwin Fletcher, an undercover investigative reporter.
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But Fletch is head and shoulders above them all.
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You know Grant, who heads up my security detail.
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Grant and I quote Fletch lines back and forth at each other every week.
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A lot of people have not seen it, but it is a very good, it is the true story of William
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Now, William Wilberforce was a member of parliament in the United Kingdom who led the effort to abolish
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And Wilberforce, so when he started as a young MP, the slave trade was the United Kingdom's
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And he begins as this young MP arguing, we must end the slave trade.
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And it would be like if you were in Texas standing up saying, we should ban oil and gas.
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I mean, it was that absurd of an idea back then.
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And the movie ends with him successfully championing and passing the legislation, abolishing the
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slave trade and shutting down their most lucrative business because it was evil.
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And by the way, the title Amazing Grace, you know where it comes from?
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So the person who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace was a friar who had been the former captain
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And think of the words of the song Amazing Grace.
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Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.
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I mean, you think of the evil entailed in being the captain of a slave ship.
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And then the amazing grace that God offered redemption, even in the face of the horrific
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The book is by Eric Metaxas, who's a fantastic author, Christian author, does great biographies.
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This is why it makes me laugh when we get to do shows like this, because I mean, I will
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You were actually out of diapers when it came out.
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What's interesting about Unforgiven that is so powerful is it turns all of the stereotypes
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So, for example, Clint Eastwood plays this outlaw who had turned over a good leaf and
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was good and then was going back, gets hired.
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What happens is a woman who is a prostitute is badly cut up by a drunk cowboy and they put
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out a reward to kill the cowboy who cut her up.
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And Clint Eastwood, as this retired outlaw, needs the money and so is coming to collect
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And Morgan Freeman, his partner, comes with him.
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But there's a point where Clint Eastwood, you know, there's a young kid who wants to be
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a gunslinger and he's like practicing on shooting fast.
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And like Clint Eastwood says, well, you know, for me, this is about as fast as I can draw
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my gun, point it, aim at it, pull the trigger and hit what I'm aiming at.
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And he said in most firefights, people are scared out of their mind and they're just terrified
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and whoever can kind of calmly engage is who wins.
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And there's scenes where like everyone's like, oh crap, and they shoot their foot and they
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drop their gun and they're like freaking out and he kind of, and he would just get
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And it, it really did invert many of the, the conventional wisdom of being a fast draw
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It is, he's the sheriff who initially you think might be the hero, but he very quickly
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I remember when it came out and everybody was in shock, but I was dying laughing.
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If you're offended by profanity, skip this suggestion.
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I will say when we were fairly newlyweds, we went on vacation with Heidi's parents down
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And we sort of, like Heidi and I remember, this is really, really funny.
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And I think we didn't quite remember that every third word is a profanity.
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And I'm sitting there with Heidi's parents as we're listening to the blinkity blink, blink,
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Like 10 minutes into it, we just turned it off.
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Heidi, I can't believe you brought this in front of your parents, right?
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I've watched Patton probably five, six times in my life.
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Do you know what I did before every Supreme Court argument I ever did?
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George C. Scott in front of the gigantic flag standing up and saying, men, the objective
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is not to give your life for your country.
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The objective is to make that other poor son of a bitch give his life for his country.
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If you can watch that speech and not be inspired, you're dead.
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But there's always usually a big speech in those.
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By the way, a buddy of mine collects historical military equipment and clothing.
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And I literally felt like I was ready to pull out a pistol and start shooting in an airplane.
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Like it made you think about that that actually rested right above the heart of Patton.
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Not a fan of his politics, but a big fan of his acting.
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Although as much, De Niro got all the acclaim, but I actually thought Robin Williams stole the show.
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Well, I love Robin Williams, so this is right up my alley.
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Robin Williams is one of my all-time favorite actors ever.
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I was asked the question if you could have dinner with like any five people who would be at your table, living or alive or dead.
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I had Robin Williams for years in my list because I think he's just one of the most brilliant actors and genuinely funny human beings.
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So when Robin Williams passed, I genuinely cried.
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And I wrote a long statement about Robin Williams on Facebook that I put up.
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But it just I hammered it out of my iPad because he he is so funny.
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If you've ever watched his stand-up routine on golf.
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The one on golf is, again, profane, language warning.
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But as funny as anything that has ever been said, like screamingly funny, Awakenings, the portrayal he gives.
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I actually like Robin Williams even better in dramatic performances than comedy.
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And he's one of the funniest human beings ever alive.
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And both standing and fighting and fighting against oppression.
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Again, if you're not inspired by them, you're dead.
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I will say, Mike Lee, there's an app where you can put yourself, you speaking, into an audio clip.
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And he and I used to send things back and forth.
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And, you know, at the end when Mel Gibson is being executed, he screams, Freedom!
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So Mike would send me videos of him screaming to Mel Gibson's voice, Freedom.
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I consider that a Christmas movie because it's like days off.
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Eddie Murphy remains one of my favorite actors of all times.
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He's got a new one coming out, a sequel coming out on Amazon.
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I don't know which one it was, but they were teasing it.
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But look, the original Beverly Hills Cop is screamingly funny.
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And I actually have three Eddie Murphy movies in a row because I love Eddie Murphy.
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So Coming to America was one of the first movies that was like really edgy that I remember
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And Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall and they play multiple characters and all the different,
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you know, in the barbershop when you have Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall going back and
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They probably wouldn't let you make that movie today.
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It gets racially edgy in a way that like now, you know, the woke world.
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Go back to young Eddie Murphy on SNL when he was like 19 years old.
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I love, he's by far my favorite character ever on SNL was young Eddie Murphy because
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Look, he was, he was great and he put his hole into it.
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I mean, but I also love like comedy when there's people falling over and he could do that
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By the way, a line that I quote frequently, Gordon Gekko is in the locker room getting cleaned
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up after playing racquetball and he turns to Charlie Sheen and he goes, I'm on the board
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That's the thing about wasps, love animals, hate people.
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Incredible movie about the African-American female mathematicians who were foundational
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And for me, there are two kind of personal reasons why that movie is significant to me.
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Well, when we went to see the movie, I took my mother to the movie.
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My girls, it was the first time they'd seen a movie that had segregation.
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The bathroom is the most, one of the most iconic scenes in that whole movie.
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And it led to, I had a long conversation with both of them and they were like, well, why
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And to talk about segregation and civil rights and just sort of walk through the history of
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it, it prompted really good conversations with my girls.
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But secondly, so my mom, my mom graduated from Rice in 1956 and she had a math degree and
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she went to work as a computer programmer at Shell.
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She subsequently went to work at the Smithsonian.
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And you remember the movie Hidden Figures begins with Sputnik being launched and sort of the
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One of my mother's first assignments at the Smithsonian was to help compute the orbits
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And, and so in front of the girls, I asked my mom, I said, mom, you were doing this.
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And in fact, you were doing it 10 years earlier.
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And my mother thought it was very accurate, that it did a really good job of conveying what
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it was like to be a woman in, in space and science and, and a technical environment.
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And I commented to her, I said, okay, one of the strange things to a more modern ear is
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that they referred to the women there as computers.
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And we think of a computer as a piece of metal.
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But they were actually called computers because they were actually doing the math.
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And my mother started laughing at me and she said her first job title was computer.
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And when she started at Shell, she had a business card that said Eleanor Dara computer.
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And so in response to that, I introduced legislation to rename the street in front of NASA headquarters
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I introduced that legislation before it could pass and we would have gotten it passed.
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But a DC city councilman saw that legislation and said, you know what?
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And the DC city councilman introduced it in the DC city council.
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So I went to the street sign dedication and that is the street sign there.
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And so NASA, the address of NASA is One Hidden Figures Way.
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The DC city councilman spoke and he's a Democrat.
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And I told the story of my mom, which was really cool to get to tell.
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And I said, look, at some level, you might say, listen, the street sign's not that big
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But at another level, you know, 50 years from now, 100 years from now, some little girl,
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some little boy is going to come visit NASA and they're going to look up and see the
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street sign and they're going to say, hey, what does that mean?
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And they're going to hear the story of the pioneering African-American women who were the mathematicians
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And so it's where movies and stories are powerful.
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Did any of the characters of the movie, did any of them get to come to that?
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The other one is that I can, I've only watched it one time because I just can't bring myself
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Those two movies to me are must sees, but I just, I don't know if it's because I become
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a dad and having kids now and watching the kids.
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So as you know, a couple of weeks ago I was at Normandy for the 80th anniversary of D-Day
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and wildly enough I got to meet Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, which was really cool.
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And I had pretty extended conversations with both of them and they've done, look, their
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politics are both left of center, but they've done an amazing job really honoring and telling
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the stories of the greatest generation, whether Saving Private Ryan, whether Band of Brothers,
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And so we're talking about that and I was talking with Spielberg about Schindler's List
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and just, you know, talking with the heroes, the World War II heroes who almost all say,
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I could have done more and the real heroes are under those crosses behind us.
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And I was telling Spielberg, I said, hearing them say that reminds me of the end of Schindler's
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list where Oscar Schindler is like, I could have done more.
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And he looks down at his gold watch and he said, this watch, this watch could have saved
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Three more people are dead because I kept my watch.
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And you think about the heroism of his rescuing Jews from the Nazis and the incredible courage,
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but at the same time, the like, why didn't I do even more?
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And then that, that to me is the most beautiful moment of that movie is the, the, the, the sort
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I'm going to take a detour, a detour to the world of musicals.
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So like you, if you go to New York, you would put it on your list to go see a show.
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I love Broadway and I'm going to have four musicals on here.
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So number one is, is my father's favorite movie of all time, which is My Fair Lady.
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I've seen it because of my mom and my sister multiple times.
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See, this is why I said this show would be entertaining because I would have never thought
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So look, I was, in high school, I was president of the drama club.
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I have way too many one-liners, but I'll leave that for another show.
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There's a reason why you would have stuck me in the locker if we had known each other.
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That would have gotten you a smackdown for sure.
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But, so look, I, all politicians are frustrated actors.
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Do we have eight tracks of this or what was it?
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Um, they, they, they're, they may be somewhere.
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Uh, you know, and I warbled out, you are 16 going on 17.
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Um, I also, so I did Oliver and Oliver's a fabulous show.
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So Oliver was my senior year and the head of the music department told me, Hey, we're
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And, and he said, you know, I'd love to have you play Fagin if you can sing it.
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And, and my curse, look, I am a terrible singer.
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It, it, it, and so I actually went and for like six months I took voice lessons to try
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And, and so what happened and the nice thing about Fagin is, is Fagin's songs.
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So for example, the song reviewing the situation, a man's got a heart, hasn't he?
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And though I'd be the first to admit that I wasn't a saint, I'm finding it hard to be
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I'm going to say those six months is worth it now, right?
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I now I'm not worried about you after you retire.
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Life will cook and sew for you and come for you and go for you and go for you and nag at
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How many tickets they sell for this is what I really want to know.
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So I could do it marginally competently after six months practicing.
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And then I say and then afterwards, music director said, hey, Ted, stick around.
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And he went to the piano and he said, sing this.
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You get to, like, beat up Oliver Twist and like you're it.
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There are few things that make me happier than when my daughters are singing songs from
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I mean, it was there was a period where they were obsessed with it.
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You and I were talking about this the other day.
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My dad, I took him to New York for the first time ever for his 70th birthday.
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And then the next night I was like, would you say, I'd rather have a nice meal.
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And then my favorite music of all time is Les Mis.
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I'll tell you, the two that get me choked up are number one when John Valjean is saying,
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And he's looking down, and he says, you know, if I die, let me die.
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And the other one that gets me is the song Empty Chairs and Empty Tables at the end when
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And I will confess at the end of the presidential campaign in 2016, as I walked through the empty
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campaign office and I saw the empty chairs and empty tables, I heard the refrains of that
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By the way, when I was, all right, so 1993, I was just finished my first year of law school
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I was working in a law firm in New York for the summer.
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And I decided to fly my mom to New York for the weekend.
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And this is back when a plane ticket was a piece of cardboard.
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I FedExed a plane ticket to her with nothing else.
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It was literally, she opened the FedEx package and just a plane ticket to New York fell out.
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And she called me and she's like, Ted, I assume this is you.
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I had no note, no nothing, just a plane ticket and the FedEx thing.
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So I flew her to New York and we went out to dinner at Boulay, which at the time was
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the nicest restaurant in New York, was fabulous.
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And then I took her one night to see Camelot, which was really fun.
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That's one of those ironed memories for us in life.
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That's like in my dad's, like, I grew up on John Wayne and war movies.
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And that was like, I remember watching it with him.
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Other than Unforgiven, Magnificent Seven is the greatest Western that's actually originally
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Unforgiven was sort of a modern remake format, but Magnificent Seven, exquisite with, you
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know, Ewell Brenner and Charles Bronson and James Coburn.
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Oh, when Mom was out of town, that was one of the movies we watched.
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And I feel bad that I left Reservoir Dogs off because Reservoir Dogs is exquisite too.
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But if you made me pick two, I go with Pulp Fiction and Inglorious.
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So that's 25 movies, which if you've got some down time, download them, watch them.
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If you could only take one movie and one TV series to a desert island with you, what would
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Don't forget we do this show Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
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Every once in a while we get to do something fun like this.
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So make sure you hit that subscribe or auto-download button.
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And the center and I will see you back here in a couple of days.